Volume 17, Issue 11 (November 2017)

2017 has a few more weeks left which look to be busy with end of year, holidays and other activities. Like the rest of 2017 November saw a lot of activity in and around the industry, setting up 2018 as yet another sequel to the busiest and most exciting year ever.

This is also the time of year when predictions for the following year (e.g. 2018) start to roll out, some of which are variations from those of the past or perennial favorites (e.g. the year of flash, the year of cloud, the year of software defined, the year of <insert_your_favorite_item_here>. Look for predictions and perspectives in future posts and newsletters.

Also in November server storage I/O controller chip maker Marvell (not to be confused with entertainment provider Marvel) announced a merger with Cavium who had previously acquired Qlogic among others. The resulting combined entity to be called Marvell will have an estimated $16 Billion USD revenue stream focused on server, storage, I/O and networking technologies among others.

Also at the end of November was AWS Reinvent with many announcements (more on those in a follow-up newsletter and posts). Prior to Reinvent AWS announced several server, storage and other data infrastructure security enhancements including for S3. Highlights from AWS reinvent include Fargate (serverless aka containers at scale without managing infrastructure), Elastic Container Services for Kubernetes (EKS), Greengrass (machine learning [ML] data infrastructure), along with many others.

Fargate is for those who want to leverage serveless microservices containers without having to devote DevOps and related activity to the care and feeding of its data infrastructure. In other words, Fargate is for those who want to focus maximum effort on the business applications, vs. the business of setting up and maintaining the data infrastructure for serverless On the other hand, AWS also announced EKS for those who want or need to customize their serverless data infrastructure including around Kubernetes among others.

In other industry activity, Taiwanese based Foxconn who manufactures technology for the who's who of the industry announced progress towards their future Wisconsin based factory complex.

OwnBackup announced a new version of their data protection software, while low-cost budget bulk storage service backblaze (B2) announced their more recent quarterly drive failure (or success) reliability reports. Meanwhile over at Quantum they released former Ceo Jon Gacek and rotated in new management.

Red Hat announced Ceph Storage 3 including CephFS (POSIX compatible file system), iSCSI gateway including support for VMware and Windows that lack native Ceph drivers, daemon deployment in Linux containers for smaller hardware footprint. Also included are enhanced monitoring, troubleshooting and diagnostics to streamline deployment and ongoing management. Red Hat also announced OpenShift version 3.7 for containers.

SANblaze announced NVMf and dual port NVMe capabilities for NVMe fabrics, while Linbit won an European grant to build out a software defined storage cloud scale out solution.

I often get asked who are the hot, new, trendy or other vendors and services to keep an eye on some of which I have mentioned in previous newsletters, as well as posts such as here and here. Moving in to 2018 some to keep an eye on (not all are new or trendy, yet they can enable you to be productive, or differentiate) include the following.

What the above means, is that it has been a busy month as well as year, and, the year is not over yet. There are still plenty of shopping days left both for christmas and the holidays, as well as for IT year-end spending, vendors looking to do acquisitions, or other last-minute projects. Speaking of which, drop me a note if you have any end of year, or new year projects Server StorageIO can assist you with.

Greg Schulz is founder of the Server and StorageIO (StorageIO) Group, an IT industry analyst and consultancy firm. Greg has worked with various server operating systems along with storage and networking software tools, hardware and services. Greg has worked as a programmer, systems administrator, disaster recovery consultant, and storage and capacity planner for various IT organizations. He has worked for various vendors before joining an industry analyst firm and later forming StorageIO.

In addition to his analyst and consulting research duties, Schulz has published over a thousand articles, tips, reports and white papers and is a sought after popular speaker at events around the world. Greg is also author of the books Resilient Storage Network (Elsevier) and The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC). His blog is at www.storageioblog.com and he can also be found on twitter @storageio.